In previous articles, I have suggested that the arrival of the Flashback Data Archive in Oracle RDBMS 11g allowed us to finally say goodbye to journalling tables. Keeping track of all changes and previous states of our records in our own dedicated tables is no longer required, was my statement (for example in http://technology.amis.nl/blog/2453/oracle-11g-total-recall-flashback-in-the-hands-of-database-designers-and-application-developers-at-last-and-the-end-of-journalling-tables). Not only would using Flashback Data Archives require less programming, it improves performance for DML operations substantially and also provides a lot of functionality at our fingertips, as Flashback Queries easily incorporate historical records in straightforward SQL queries and using dbms_flashback we can even turn back time and regard all data as it was back then, using the same application and all the same queries.

In the not too distant past, Flashback knew quite a long list of limitations that made it almost impossible to make any changes to a table definition and still retain the historical data. With recent improvements in 11gR2, most of these limitations have been removed and DDL such as More >